“Life Is So Short," I Said Sighing, "The Past So Long. Shouldn't We Turn The Page And Move On?"
"The Past Is The Future," Aunt Emily Shot Back”
― Joy Kogawa, Obasan
EAST OF THE ROCKIES
A Short while ago I was approached by Jam3 to Direct and produce a fully new 3d animated trailer for their Augmented reality game collaboration with Canadian author Joy Kogawa and the NFB. Since I was to create a more highly polished look than the low poly game assets could support while maintaining the look, feel and tonality of the game itself, it proved to be a rather unique and ultimately rewarding challenge that accumulated in the creation of a short teaser storyline trailer.
Armed with a handful of low poly unity assets and about two weeks, I set to recreating key locations from the story in Cinema4d, adding in freshly rigged characters and new textured assets to add a higher level of fidelity to the scenes. Final outputs were all rendered in octane and composited in AE to provide a more vintage look to the footage.
Below are some outtakes that didn’t make the main trailer for time constraints.
Due to time constraints, we worked by providing a wireframe renders of all the scenes prior to the final renders. This allowed us to block in the camera moves and illustrate the environment and scene flow without the need for a final render. Below is one of the late stage pre-vis outputs.
Creative Direction - Lee James Ormerod
Compositing - Lee James Ormerod
3d animation - Andrew Guan, Lee James Ormerod
Character rigging - Luis Chique
Agency - Jam3
Producer - Jason Legge, Alex Predusel
Based on source material by Jam3 and Joy Kogawa